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Staff Working Papers present the results of economic, financial, or technical research; country experience or analysis; operational evaluations; or detailed background or case studies. These are typically works in progress, published informally to present the results of research with the least possible delay. Not all reports have been declassified.

The world faces a combination of serious risks immediately ahead: the worst El Niño since 1997–98 (which we know caused global displacement of 20–30 million people, more than today’s Syrian crisis), climate change, increased food insecurity, escalating conflict in countries like Syria and Afghanistan, violent extremism, a slowing global economy, and a humanitarian system that is stretched beyond its capacity.
... See More + Any of these factors can contribute to forced displacement; together, they could make current humanitarian crises even worse. Forced displacement today is a global problem and at present, is being driven mostly by conflict. It causes tremendous human suffering, tends to be protracted and has significant short-term financial costs. However, once it has occurred and under certain circumstances, it can also result in long-term gains to both displaced persons and their hosts. Strong humanitarian-development linkages would help smooth this path, reducing the short-term costs and helping capture the long-term gains. The objective is to adopt reforms that are (a) comprehensive, ranging from prevention and preparedness to timely development response; (b) credible, that is, targeted, evidence based interventions that produce measurable results and represent value for money; (c) customized, with appropriate instruments, clear accountabilities and ownership of risks (e.g., between households, governments, private sector, international community), and suitable funding instruments (including insurance) and burden-sharing (such as financing for host countries providing a global public good); and (d) coherent and coordinated among partners, including the UN and state and non-state actors.
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This study was launched to make a modest beginning for systematic assessment of information and communications technology (ICT) investments in the public sector in developing countries.
... See More + The effort was to go beyond the anecdotal assessments that were commonly available. The objectives of the study include: (i) to develop and present a framework to conduct analysis on the impact of public sector investments in ICT applications; (ii) to assess the effect of ICT investments on performance measures for a selected set of projects and identify the key determinants of economic, organizational, and social impact, based on analysis of sample cases; and (iii) to propose guidelines and a methodology that can be used by subsequent studies to work with more comprehensive data sets and expanded metrics of outcome to assess impact of future projects. The results of the retrospective evaluation of the seven projects carried out in this study highlight the relevance of such an exercise for government officials preparing a plan for an ICT project and development institutions such as the World Bank. The results provide a cue for investigating the reasons why a certain project may not be delivering on a potential area of service improvement. They also provide a preliminary benchmark for comparing other ongoing projects and those that will be implemented in the future.
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Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer substantial opportunities for development effectiveness. ICT has a pervasive impact on competitiveness and all aspects of life in advanced economies as well as potential impact on social and economic development.
... See More + Therefore the strategic significance of ICT for enabling national development and poverty reduction strategies must be operationalized by countries striving to gain a competitive edge. In fact, the author of this paper asserts, economic history, the cumulative learning and transformation process involved in using ICT, and the pace of this wave of technological change suggest that, with timely action, many developing countries could participate in a technological revolution no less profound than the last industrial revolution. This paper explores the need for national strategies for ICT-enabled development, including: 1) the challenges and opportunities created by the information and communication technology revolution and their implications for development policy and strategies; 2) the many ways ICT is likely to impact social and economic development; 3) an examination of why developing countries should look ahead and try to adapt and harness ICT in support of economic and social development; 4) the importance of mastering the use of ICT has become a core competency for competition and sustained development; 5) a broad view of the promises and risks of the ICT revolution and its potential impact on, among others, productivity, markets, organizations, and education; and 6) a rational for designing national strategies for e-development.
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The RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) rules the database roost in the 1980s and OO (Object Oriented) programming languages revolutionized software development in the 1990s.
... See More + RDBMS and OO programming languages have complementary strengths. Relational database systems are good for managing large amounts of data; object oriented programming languages are good at expressing complex relationships among objects. Relational database systems are good for data retrieval but provide little support for data manipulation; object oriented programming languages are excellent at data manipulation but provide little or no support for data persistence and retrieval. Thee complementary strengths have given birth to a new breed of database management systems popularly known as Object Relational Database Management Systems (ORDBMS). The other database model which deals purely with objects is the ODBMS (Object Database Management System). ODBMSs pre-date the object relational model and have been in use since "time immemorial" in niche applications including multimedia. This paper mainly focuses on database object concepts, specifications, and implementations using the two core models-ORDBMS and ODBMS.
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This paper examines the benchmarking process as it relates to information technology (IT). Both the traditional and the activity based approaches are discussed with pros and cons mentioned.
... See More + Concentration of the benchmark procedure on an organization's 'capacity to change' is advised and can be accomplished by taking into account the following factors: staff skills, knowledge management, organization structure flexibility, project management, financial management, operations management, and IT clients. While open to misunderstanding, benchmarking the 'capacity for change' should provide valuable insight into an organization's IT capabilities and weaknesses.
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The model of the world tea economy described herein has a number of general features which are shared by other econometric commodity models. The stylized version of an econometric agricultural commodity market model usually contains supply equations for the major producers, demand equations for major consumers and either inventory demand equations or price equations.
... See More + However, within this general structure there are usually many variations. Section I of the report begins with a brief overview of the relevant literature concerning commodity models. Section II provides an overview of the new global tea model and an outline of important features of the data used in estimation. Section III sets out the theoretical specification and the empirical estimates of the supply side while Sections IV, V, and VI deal, respectively, with the demand side, price determination and the simulation properties of the model.
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This paper discusses the sub-Saharan Africa external debt problem. While no clear solutions a discussion of the origin and development of the Africa debt problem points to some mistakes of the past that need to be avoided in the future.
... See More + The major ones identified in the paper are excessive responses to favorable but probably temporary terms of trade shifts, inflexible public expenditure programs, investments directed primarily by availability of external financing, and delays in macroeconomic adjustment supported by nonconcessionary financing. Nonetheless, implementation of policies based on these lessons are not sufficient to overcome the current debt service difficulties. To illustrate, the scheduled debt service for 1985-87 on debt outstanding at the end of 1983 is about double that actually met in the past, where the contrast is characteristic of almost all countries, not only for the few extreme cases. The final section of the paper presents implications for action on the part of creditors and debtors to enable a return to a more stable functioning of external financing process.
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This paper examines the prospects for rural nonagricultural development in China in light of the experience in other Asian developing countries.
... See More + The paper reviews the Asian experience and some of the more significant issues relating to the growth, importance and composition of the rural nonagricultural sector. It then discusses rural nonagricultural development in China, and finally, it examines the prospects and policy options for rural nonagricultural development in China. It is argued that the future pace and direction of rural nonagricultural development will be strongly influenced by government policy towards agriculture, by the pace and the extent of economic reform currently under way, and by the pattern of future urbanization. It suggests, furthermore, the prospects for rural nonagricultural development are not equally good among China's rural regions.
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This paper examines the extent of non-tariff barriers to sixteen industrial countries' visible imports. Using three alternative measures it shows that governmental commodity-specific border-measures affect over 27 percent of all imports and over 34 percent of imports from developing countries.
... See More + It also shows that during the period 1981-83, NTBs became significantly more extensive. Detailed statistics reveal considerable variations in NTB coverage by commodity, type of barrier, importer and exporter. The data on which these conclusions are based are compiled from official information at the finest level of disaggregation; they are described in the paper.
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This paper summarizes the results of empirical research on changes in the structure of expenditure, production, employment and investment in the course of economic development, with special reference to large countries at low to middle income levels.
... See More + All the studies surveyed, however, relate to developing countries other than China. The objective is to identify regularities in the pattern of structural change elsewhere that might be relevant to China's future development.
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This study compares China's government finance sector with that of other low-income countries and draws lessons from the structural differences between the public sectors of low- and middle-income countries.
... See More + In light of China's objective to move to a middle-income status by the end of the century, and its recent progress in implementing economic reforms, such a study appears very timely.
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Although the electronics industry in China has come a long way since 1949, Chinese authorities acknowledge that it is at least 15-20 years behind the levels of Japan and the U.S., necessitating new and improved productive processes as well as new products in the electronics industry.
... See More + The paper examines China's electronics industry and its scope for development by considering its application to other indigenous industry, at what level and by what means development should occur, and what institutional structures will need to be set up.
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This paper discusses the role of technology in intensive growth, which involves reducing costs, increasing productivity and introducing new and better products.
... See More + It makes estimates of total factor productivity growth for Chinese industry and analyzes such issues as what should be done about backward enterprises, how to choose between domestic and foreign technology, how to promote diffusion of technology, how to improve incentives for innovation. A dominant theme is that the key to intensive growth in China lies not only on better access to modern technology, but also in systematic reforms that would generate incentives for enterprises to make sound investment decisions and pay constant attention to costs and product quality.
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When a country moves away from tight restrictions on trade and investment toward a more open system, it can gain significantly from increased efficiency but may also encounter intensified problems in such domains as unemployment, setbacks to particular industries, increased inequality, issues of foreign influence, and even absolutely reduced income levels in poorer regions.
... See More + China has both more to gain and more to lose from a change toward an open system than most other countries. The scope for gain is especially great because of the pervasive character of prior departures from efficiency in relative prices and in the structure of production, because the country became so far out of touch with modern technology, and because it has an industrial base and the necessary skills to move rapidly to higher levels of productivity. But the scope for loss is also great because the society has so many distinctive characteristics worth a great deal of effort to preserve. Some of the main issues concern inequality within and between regions, highly differential capacity among regions in their near-term capacity to respond to increased trade and investment, and possible dislocations of a unique system of social participation and protection.
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This paper examines some of the options for urbanization in China in the light of international experience. Identified are common features of the urban sector across countries, describing trade relations and production patterns among cities in an economy and their relationships to city size distributions, locations of economic activity, and regional development.
... See More + The relationships between economic development, urbanization, industrialization, centralization and urban concentration are also examined. The policies discussed include both direct urban and location policies and the indirect effects on urbanization and location of state pricing policies, price subsidies and state allocation policies for resources and goods subject to mandatory planning. Finally, outlined are some of the options for future urbanization in China, distinguishing between an option that allows for more rational spatial patterns of investment and location of firms, without a change in population allocation, and, in addition an option that permits varying degrees of population mobility. The implications of these options for national policies are also discussed.
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This paper reviews recent patterns in international financial flows to both developed and developing countries. It notes that, while borrowings by developed countries have increasingly been characterized by innovations in instruments and practices, financial flows to developing countries have largely been in the form of syndicated credits.
... See More + Following a brief description of some of the more prominent innovations in international capital markets, the paper concludes that there is now a marked preference by lenders for short-term, tradable paper. It then examines the reasons for the absence of innovations in the lending process for developing countries and discusses ways for introducing innovations to the international financial intermediation process for developing countries. The conclusion is that the "securitization" of the lending process is likely to be the norm in the future as it holds benefits for both borrowers and lenders, while the syndicated credit will be largely confined to "involuntary" lending. Finally, the paper recommends that international institutions, in particular the World Bank, take the initiative in helping introduce international capital market innovations to the borrowing process for developing countries.
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International financing for developing countries has failed to fulfill its potential not only because bankers were lending too much or countries borrowing too much, but also because of the structure of the financial arrangements, overwhelmingly general obligation credit largely in the form of floating rate bank loans.
... See More + Bank debt requires servicing that bears a perverse relationship to developing countries' ability to pay; it fails to shift risk to world capital markets in line with comparative advantage and, consequently, fails to shift responsibility for the selection as well; and it concentrates the risk of default in major commercial banks that represent a small fraction of world financial markets and, as a result, increase the possibility that debt crisis in developing countries will become a world debt crisis. Several steps to correct these shortcomings, including modifications in bank financing and an increased role of nonbank institutions, are outlined.
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The evolution of the international financial system is determined to a large extent by the development of the financial system in the dominant country or countries.
... See More + Domestic financial systems pass through three different stages: the bank-oriented phase, the market-oriented phase, and the strongly-market-oriented phase. The world financial system is now in the bank-oriented phase but is moving into a strongly market-oriented phase now beginning to characterize the United States and the United Kingdom. The other major European countries and Japan are entering the market-oriented phase. Until the 1930s developing countries raised the bulk of their external funds on capital markets in Britain and the other industrial countries. Since then they have come increasingly to rely on bank funds. They can benefit most from the now changing international system by acquiring a full knowledge of the way it functions and applying its principles to their own fund raising operations. By so doing they will strengthen the financial links between the developing countries and the rest of the world as well as promote the economic integration of the world economy at large.
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Since the introduction of the stabilization program in Turkey in January 1980, export growth has occupied a crucial role in Turkey's development strategy.
... See More + This represented a major departure from the hitherto followed inward-looking strategy of import substitution. In the changed environment the success on the export front became a sine qua non for the success of the new policy as a whole. The Government, which centralized the administration of export incentives and increased their importance, gave strong indications that it would follow through with this policy. Turkish exports responded strongly: in the period 1980-84 they increased from $2.9 billion to $7.1 billion. Increased export incentives were instrumental in stimulating export growth. These incentives included continuous depreciation of the exchange rate, payment of tax rebates, access to subsidized export credits, and duty-free imports of necessary inputs for exports.
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The principal purpose of the monograph is to use general equilibrium methodology to explain the logical foundations of shadow prices and the techniques for deriving shadow price expressions.
... See More + We first discuss the nature and meaning of shadow prices. Then we build a simple model in which each traded good is produced with intermediate inputs and a value added aggregate which are used in fixed proportions and with constant returns to scale, where the value added aggregate is a variable proportions function of a sector specific fixed factor and an intersectorally mobile factor of production which is common to all sectors. Using this model we first derive shadow prices for labor, traded goods, non-traded goods and foreign exchange assuming full employment and a flexible real exchange rate, with household welfare being held constant by adjustments in income taxes. The same basic approach is then extended to more complex models including models with alternative adjustment mechanisms. We also discuss how to shadow price factors, goods, policy parameters and autonomous parameters in terms of other goods whose shadow prices are known without having to solve a full-fledged general equilibrium model.
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